Remember the Doha Round? That’s the stalled set of multilateral trade talks going on in Geneva since their launch with great fanfare in Qatar in 2001.

The trumpets once blazed forth the Doha Round’s objectives, building on the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement, to reach even loftier goals for reducing trade barriers in manufactured goods, in agricultural products and in services. For a time, all eyes were on Geneva and WTO headquarters on the shores of Lac Leman.

Sadly, after 10 years and countless disappointments, the talks remain bogged down, mired in complexity and endless bickering. The WTO Secretary-General, Pascal Lamy, normally given to cautiously positive assessments, stated last week that there were “unbridgeable gaps” and that the situation facing the round was “grave.” Could multilateralism in trade be dead?

To some, this is just a realistic appraisal of life in the WTO and the daunting task of mustering consensus in a world body composed of more than 150 member governments. Consensus-building is limited by the enormous complexity of the items on the table, mind numbing in their detail, scope and depth, more so than any other in the annals of international diplomacy.

This technical detail alone raises difficulties, particularly for smaller developing countries that lack the resources needed to analyze and assess the implications of thousands of proposals currently on the table. Even countries with abundant legal, economic and technical expertise have difficulty in this regard.

When the so-called Uruguay Round of talks produced the 1994 WTO Agreement, agriculture trade was left mostly unfinished. To deal with agriculture, it was agreed that another round of talks would be needed. This, in turn, required a critical mass of non-agriculture items, putting enough issues on the table to allow for bargaining and cross-sector trade-offs. So market access for manufactured goods and trade in services were added to the Doha Round agenda. But it wasn’t clear that the necessary political will existed to make concessions on these additional issues to ensure a sustained collective commitment to success.

So the Doha Round was saddled at the outset by a negotiating agenda that was a bit of a hodgepodge, assembled through political compromise and expediency in the horse-trading that took place in the days before the Round was launched. Once launched, there was no chance of adjusting that list. The chances of success were thus reduced from the start.

New crises then emerged while the WTO talks were continuing, demanding the urgent attention of the global community — notably climate change and, recently, the recession and the ongoing debt and credit crisis. Governments’ collective attention to trade matters subsided and the Doha Round receded in political consciousness.

At the same time, international business, ever dynamic, moved on. Indeed, even with the setback in the 2008-09 recession and notwithstanding the continuing eurozone crisis, international trade has recovered at a remarkable pace in 2010. The WTO has just reported that world trade grew by 14.5% last year, breaking all previous records. Forecasts for 2011 are for a reduced but still impressive 6.5% growth. In other words, global trade expanded and recovered to pre-recession levels, all without a new Doha Round agreement.

While this doesn’t deny that global trade would be even greater with the Doha Round completed, it does show that the international economy is managing pretty well and that the existing WTO rules, if not perfect, are pretty robust. This indirectly takes pressure off governments to make difficult compromises to achieve a new agreement in Geneva.

So where does this leave us? Have we reached the end of the road in global rule-making? If the WTO talks collapse, does this mean that multilateralism has run its course?

Those questions are difficult to answer. At this stage, it is tempting to conclude that we may have indeed reached the limits of multilateralism. We now see greater attention to governments concluding bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements. The landscape is dense with dozens, possibly hundreds, of these more limited deal-making exercises.

Canada’s trade-policy priority has shifted in like measure, not entirely but certainly in notable degree, from Geneva to individual capitals. On Canada’s active list are negotiations with India and the European Union, plus perennial efforts to get negotiations going with Japan and China. The list goes on. This reveals increasing attention to settling market-access issues on a bilateral basis.

None of this detracts from the critical importance of the multilateral trading system. Difficult trade issues can only be settled within the WTO framework. The pillars of international trade law enshrined in the WTO will remain as governments search out new trade agreements on a bilateral basis.

However, there is clearly a disconnect between the snail’s pace of WTO negotiations and the dynamic nature of international trade and commerce. While multilateralism may not yet be dead and buried, the difficulties in the Doha Round have shown the frailties of the existing WTO system and brought home the need for a more dynamic, responsive and streamlined model in international trade negotiations.

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